“Hunter’s green is the wood-nymph’s wear forever,” Raymond declared, eying Arabella as she stood in distinct relief against the darker green of the rhododendron hedge, in the flickering sunshine and shade under the branches of a balsam fir. “But I have no doubt,” he continued, with a sudden courteous afterthought, “that the archery uniform, though not designed with a strict view of sylvan utility, was very smart in faint green.”
“Oh, it was,—it was,”—she acceded, with ready good-humor. “It was relieved with white—”
“Oh, another tone of green, by all means,” he blurted out impulsively, and now he had some ado to catch himself in this inadvertence—was he dull enough, he asked himself, to openly worship in set phrase the gown she now wore? “Was the relief a dead white,—like our pipe-clay gear?” he critically demanded.
“No-o—what they call a white silver cloth, now-a-days, and with a little cap of white silver cloth, with a tinsel half-moon.”
“Oh, a lady is so fair,—the caps ought to have been a dark green to set off an exquisite fairness,—and a broad hat, a furry beaver hat, would have been prettier in my eyes than a cap.”
Oh, fool! seeming much confused now, and just remembering that it is her hat—her broad furry beaver hat—in your mind, lying there in the sand, with its drooping feather and its long strings of wide sage-green ribbon to tie under her delicate chin. No wonder you turn deeply red, and begin to try the bow-line of a great unstrung Indian bow with all your strength.
“But all ladies are not fair,” she protested. “That white silver cloth cap was Eva Golightly’s selection to set off her black hair,—she wears no powder,—that is, not on her hair!”
He laughed gayly at the imputation, and the roguish glance of her eyes encountered in his a candid mutual enjoyment of the little fling.
“But it is a charming costume,” she went on, “and so convenient,—with no hanging sleeves, nor lappets or frills to catch at the bow and arrow as one shoots,—everything laid on in plain bands,—I wish I had not left it at home, but of course I did not dream I should have any such lovely chance to shoot here.”
“And why not, pray?—the land of the bow and arrow!”